The Test

On a brief note, since last month’s R9 Fury X review, AMD has reunified their driver base. Catalyst 15.7, released on Wednesday, extends the latest branch of AMD’s drivers to the 200 series and earlier, bringing with it all of the optimizations and features that for the past few weeks have been limited to the R9 Fury series and the 300 series.

As a result we’ve gone back and updated our results for all of the AMD cards featured in this review. Compared to the R9 Fury series launch driver, the performance and behavior of the R9 Fury series has not changed, nor were we expecting it to. Meanwhile AMD’s existing 200/8000/7000 series GCN cards have seen a smattering of performance improvements that are reflected in our results.

288 Comments

I'm curious @anandtech in general, given the likely newer state of the city/X's drivers, do you think that the performance deltas between each fury card and the respective nvidia will swing further or into AMD's favor as they solidify their drivers?Reply

So basically if you have $500 to spend on a video card, get the Fury, if you have $600, get the 980 Ti. Unless you want something liquid cooled/quiet, then the Fury X could be an attractive albeit slower option.

Driver optimizations will only make the Fury better in the long run as well, since the 980Ti (Maxwell 2) drivers are already well optimized as it is a pretty mature architecture.

I find it astonishing you can hack off 15% of a cards resources and only lose 6% performance. AMD clearly has a very good (but power hungry) architecture here.Reply

Balance is not very conclusive. There are games that take advantage of the higher resources and blows past the 980Ti and there are games that don't and therefore slower. Most likely due to developers not having access to Fury and it's resources before. I would say, no games uses that many shading units and you won't see a benefit until games do. The same with HBM. Reply

No, NONE OF US can expect anandtech to be honest about that, nor it's myriad of amd fanboys, but we can all be absolutely certain that if it was nVidia whom had done it, a full 2 pages would be dedicated to their massive mistake.